The KPMG Girl and the Anonymous Bully

Less than a week into the New Year, and the first big web story from Ireland has done the rounds on Twitter and Facebook. A video of a young blonde teenage girl, with a slurred but assured middle class Dublin accent, appeared on YouTube on Friday, with the subject of the five-minute piece berating a young male, with a working class Dublin accent, in a fast food restaurant. The video has been taken down and re-uploaded on YouTube on a number of occasions, with the Google-owned company declaring that the video contains "content designed to harass, bully or threaten". Having seen the video, I fully agree and so will not provide a link to it. One can be sure that it will reappear somewhere online over the coming days and weeks, a sad reality, given that, regardless of what the girl says in the video, she is an unwilling participant in its' filming. I'm not a fan of censorship, but freedom of speech is not absolute, especially when the primary motive is the ritual humiliation of the video's target.

For the benefit of those who either have not or do not want to see the clip for themselves, I can provide a synopsis. The girl, clearly inebriated and (according to rumour) a fifth-year secondary school student, is in the middle of a rather heated exchange with the young male operating a camera phone. She boasts of her father's high status within the professional services company KPMG, in contrast to the less glamourous lifestyle of the people engaging her from the next table, exclaiming that the budding cameraman is "not fucking a partner (within KPMG), you're a pleb". The decision to emphasise the class divide in such a manner is a poor one.

It's fair to say that the young lady doesn't cover herself in glory. She tells the male in no uncertain terms that he is a loser who will "never get anywhere" in life, after mocking him for his balding ginger hair. Asking "how much money do you make in an hour, like €10?" is considered rude at the best of times, but incredibly snobbish when done in the midst of an extended recession where at least a quarter of the workforce would be delighted to get such a wage. She sounds obnoxious, and the clever strategy for her on the night would have been to quietly ignore the wind-up merchants, finish off her takeaway, and leave. However, hindsight is 20-20 vision, and the fact that she is evidently drunk may partly explain why she chose to speak her mind so freely, while her youth could explain her lack of maturity, which might have pause and consider the risk of mouthing off in an environment where rogue filming is going on. After all, how many stupid things does any person say or do while intoxicated?

Looking outside of the actual content of the video for a moment, it becomes apparent that there is an issue about context surrounding this clip. The fact that the video's subject appears agitated from the outset suggests that she may have been harassed by the phone's operator before filming begins, given that one simply does not walk into a takeaway and start verbally assaulting a person at another table that they don't know, while simultaneously trying to be pleasant to everyone else at that table. Although we aren't provided with the context leading to the video, it would be absurd to assume that the young woman deliberately targeted an individual for abuse in a takeaway without any reason to do so.

More worryingly, when one again looks at the footage, it becomes evident that the young man is not merely interested in recording their conversation. Barely twenty seconds into the video, he films the girl's legs at close range for a number of seconds, a process he repeats several times more over the five-minute period. This creepy aspect of the filming adds a deeper dimension to an event that is already of questionable legality. One or two brief, incidental shots could probably be dismissed as accidents or poor camera control, but the sustained close-ups suggest a deliberate attempt to get as close to an "upskirt" shot as possible, a seedy level of effort by the anonymous moviemaker. Given that she expresses shock at the exchange being recorded at the end of the video, she obviously did not give permission for anyone to record footage of her legs; the fact that she may also be underage (since a fifth-year secondary school student would be 16 or 17) only serves to make this illicit filming all the more sinister. Four minutes in, he jokes that "every time this bitch says KPMG, we have to take a shot"; indeed, he goads her into repeating the name of the company, mocking her by insisting on how great the company is. The man sounds somewhat worse the wear for drink himself, but it is clear that he is still somewhat in command of his faculties, given his ability to both operate a camera phone and  to continue winding up his target.

To make matters worse, he willingly uploaded the video to YouTube, meaning that he had time to consider his actions but chose to ignore his own sexism, the blatant attempts to make the girl angry and, most disturbingly, his obvious filming of her legs and efforts to inch the camera higher, and upload the video anyway. The most noble reason I can think of for wanting to upload such a video is to provide an illustration of an opinion held by the children of the élite of the "lower orders" in Irish society, a view quite possibly engendered by that child's upbringing and their more privileged background. However, the reality is that this video is clearly designed to mock a drunk teenager, who was the target of some form of unwanted attention, and to "take her down a peg" by humiliating her on a global video-sharing website.

It cannot be underestimated how upsetting this must be for this girl. It is difficult to condone her method of engagement with the cameraman, and even more difficult to agree with her opinion, but it would be a heart of stone to not feel even slightly upset for how devastated she must be. Regardless of class or sex, a 16 or 17 year old is trying to find their place in life, desperately wanting to be accepted by their peers and heavily inclined to feel embarrassed by even the slightest mishap that occurs to them. If you're lucky enough to no longer need ID to get into a pub, try to remember something from your teenage days that still makes you cringe, something that you'd laugh off had it happened today but that still causes red cheeks because you were a teen. Now imagine that incident being recorded, without your knowledge, and placed online for worldwide distribution, without your permission. That girl probably spent the majority of Friday bawling her eyes out, and will dread returning to school on Monday, where she will have to face her peers knowing that they probably all saw the clip over the weekend. She was provoked into a reaction, yet will garner the lion's share of the attention for what she says in the video. She has been, and will continue to be, vilified for her reaction instead of being treated for what she actually is, the victim of cruel social and sexual bullying by a faceless coward who hides behind a camera and uses the footage to further torment his target.

Even if she was obnoxious, was this really worth it?